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Reminds me of the old #bash IRC channel. Asking things found in the tutorials got you either a cold shoulder, or more often, triggered by criptic "32" or "5" from admins - a bot answering your question shallowly and then sending you to a specific site in the tutorial.

You got very good answers to any original questions, though you should start by showing where you searched for answers already.

They hated "do it for me" kind of requests that usually looked like somebody asking you to do their homework assignment. I even got called out on it once, but could happily reply that I'm actually just messing with my system as a hobby.

One time I had a "do it for me" request.

I've run a sed command which appended sth.bak to every file of some type on, but accidently made it execute on all files on the system. They quickly gave me a one liner to fix my machine (a VM, but it took long to set up). However, when after fixing the system, I asked for explanation of the xargs command that was used there, I instantly got sent off to the FAQ with a number.

by Macha5 hours ago|

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The answer has always been “I asked Bob and Bob half remembered you worked in it once”, without any attempt to look for info, in my experience :(

by scottlamb4 hours ago|

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When I get that, I just repeat the question "where did you look in the docs?", or just "go look at the docs now" if they're really dense. I can't help them until they have a better answer.

It takes a few tries before they internalize that they need to have a doc link before expecting my help. Once they do, I might take the next step to saying "here's the answer; can you update the docs so the next person doesn't have to ask?" And it might take a few tries before that sticks too. My goal is to eventually turn them into someone who evangelizes the docs themselves.

When I write peer reviews for my colleagues, I describe their attitude toward documentation. If that's "they refuse to open the docs, frequently wasting their colleagues' time", it's not gonna go well. If it's "they make nice doc edits after I ask them", a little better. If it's "they proactively maintain the documentation", better still.

Of course all this is for stuff that one could reasonably expect to be documented. Help thinking through a design problem or debugging their in-progress PR is generally a different situation.

by christoff124 hours ago|

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That's when you direct them to the docs.

People rag on StackOverflow for being mean, but it was a good training ground for developing habits that satisfy the social contract of professional spaces.